Note: I started writing this before Season 2 came out, so it only treats Season 1 as canon. That means no Billy, no Max, and no 008. I'm sorry, but instead of discarding this story, I'll finish it and then write others that use Season 2.

Firebaby

Chapter 1

The unwelcome sound of the telephone dragged Jim Hopper against his will out of a fairly pleasant dream. His eyes were still too blurry to locate the offending handset, so he fumbled around on the nightstand until he felt it. The phone rang again, unmercifully loud, before he could answer it. After finally managing to press the button and hold it to his ear, he grunted a wordless syllable into it.

"Jim Hopper?" The distant and tinny voice came over the phone. The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but his brain wasn't running on all cylinders yet. Hopper rubbed his eyes with two fingers and then glanced over at the clock.

"Hey, you called me," he reminded the anonymous voice who had the audacity to ask him a question so early in the morning. "Who is this?"

"It's Sam," the voice said. "Sam Asche."

"Sam?" Hopper said, his brain slowly waking up to do what it was supposed to. Then, with more recognition, he repeated "Sam? Why are you... How did you..." He sat up in bed and absentmindedly scratched at his stubble. He didn't need to ask how Sam Asche could have gotten his number. That was obvious. Fully awake at last, he tried again.

"Sam, it's been..." Hopper tried to count backward.

"Ten years," Sam supplied without hesitation. "What are you doing these days?"

"I'm retired," Hopper said, less annoyed now at having been woken up, than with the failed attempt at small talk. If the guy had tracked down Hopper's phone number, then he certainly knew he was retired. "You already know that. What's going on?"

"Yeah, I do. Sorry that... I'm sorry that I never called before. Sorry the first time you're hearing from me is like this," Sam said, choosing words, stumbling over them, and then choosing new ones.

"Like what?" Hopper asked, more concerned now than annoyed.

"I need your help," Sam said, after a long pause. Then, as if relieved that he'd finally gotten the words out, he rushed on. "I need to talk to you. I think you're- I think you might be the only one who'd understand."

"Listen," Hopper said with an apologetic half-laugh. "I'm not the Chief anymore. I don't know what kind of help you need, but these days I feed my dog and I go fishing and I change the oil in my truck."

"Please, Hop," Sam said, "I just need you to listen, and not think what I'm gonna say is crazy."

His voice suddenly sounded so haunted that Hopper gave up trying to argue. He'd never known the guy to be overly dramatic.

"Okay, I'm listening," Hopper said cautiously.

"Well, there's this case. Where do I even start?"

"You still in Indianapolis?" Hopper asked.

"No, I moved about four years ago," Sam told him. "I'm with the Sacramento Police department now. Anyway, there's this case. Five people dead, two of them cops."

Hopper swore sadly. "Friends of yours?"

"Yeah," Sam said, his voice catching. Hopper still didn't see how he could help in any way, but if all Sam needed was a grief counselor, then he was going to do his best.

"I don't know. Maybe this whole thing messed me up or something," Sam said. "I've been around, you know? I've lost people before. But now, I don't know. Maybe it's making me see things. Two days ago I was responding to a call and I saw..."

Hopper waited for him to go on, but he seemed to need a push.

"Yeah?" Hopper asked.

"Listen, you'll think I'm crazy. But... maybe you won't. I don't know."

"What?" Hopper pressed him, really curious at last.

"I thought to call you because I heard you go into some things."

"Sam?" Hopper said, the first note of alarm slipping into his voice.

"I heard some stories about what happened there in Hawkins ten years ago," Sam said, almost apologetically.

Hopper's stomach lurched. He hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary in ten years. Not a bugged phone, not a flickering light bulb, not even a weird shadow. Hawkins Lab was an empty, abandoned concrete brick these days, and Hawkins was a quiet place again where nothing unusual ever happened. But that was no reason to be stupid.

"Sam," he said slowly and clearly. "I think you should stop talking right now."

"Hop-"

"Sam!" He caught himself and spoke more quietly but just as clearly into the handset. "I don't know what you heard, but nothing happened in Hawkins ten years ago. Absolutely nothing happened, and if it did, you'd be crazy to talk about it over the phone."

"I just need you to listen to me, Hop," Sam begged.

Hopper sat in silence for a long moment just listening to the background buzz of the phone connection. He'd never known Sam to be careless. The guy knew how to talk over a police radio when anyone in the world might be listening in. He knew how to carefully word a police report so that blame didn't end up on the wrong person. He knew which things you could say to a reporter and which things you could say to the Chief and which things you could only tell your partner. He wasn't stupid, and he wasn't careless. If it had been someone else, Hopper knew he would have hung up the phone then and there.

"Look, I wish I could help you," Hopper said, pressing the handset harder against his cheek. "But we can NOT talk about this."

"Then let me fly you out here," Sam said quickly.

"What?" Hopper laughed.

"It's not the money, Hop, it's my own sanity," Sam told him. "Everyone here thinks I'm crazy. The Chief wants to take me off the case. I think, I'm pretty sure you'll understand."

"I can't just fly out to, to, to California," Hopper said, waving a hand in the air as if the other could see him.

"You're retired," Sam said with just the faintest hint of a smile in his voice. "What else have you got to do?"

"It's not that, it's just..." Hopper realized he was having trouble coming up with reasons.

"Please, Hop, I need your help, real bad. Look, I'd offer you money, but I know you better than that. I'm asking for your help. I don't know what else I can do if you say no."

Hopper tried to think of any possible reason to say no, but in the end none of them mattered. The relief in Sam's voice when he finally agreed... Hopper had never heard his friend quite like that before. He warned Sam again to say nothing else about it over the phone, and Sam promised to explain everything when he picked him up at the airport. Placing the handset back on its cradle, Hopper stared around the bedroom and shook his head. Yesterday he'd spent his evening cleaning fish. If he'd known that the next morning he'd... have the conversation he'd just had, he might have unplugged the phone before going to sleep.

The smell of cooking eggs drew him out of his unpleasant thoughts. With his knees creaking as they did these days, he lifted himself out of bed and headed toward the kitchen.

"Joyce," he called. "You aren't going to like this."

With the familiar sound of the bell, the students of Hawkins Middle School's eighth grade class erupted from their chairs like a flock of birds and headed for the door. Mike Wheeler could hardly blame them. Since it was the last class on a Friday, the dismissal bell signaled the start of their weekend.

"Remember the test on Monday," he called over the noise of scraping chairs, zipping backpacks, and talking children, "which will cover Newton's 3 laws of motion in essay format." His voice trailed off as most of the kids were already out the door. Most of the kids had gone, but three stayed behind and rushed up to his desk, staring up at him expectantly.

"Did it come?" Little Danny asked.

"Sorry, kids," Mike said earnestly. "Nothing yet. You'll have to keep running your campaign without the new Monster Manual for a while longer."

"When are YOU going to start running a campaign for us again, Mr. Wheeler?" begged the second boy, Lenny.

"I'm sorry," Mike said again with a small smile. "I just don't have the time like I used to. The baby, you understand, right?"

"How IS the baby?" The third kid, blond and boisterous Amy, asked.

"Bigger every day," Mike said.

"Does she cry a lot?" Amy asked.

"Only when we're trying to sleep," Mike said, only half joking. "So where are the three of you going this weekend?" He asked.

"Into the Plane of Fire," Amy answered right away. "Lenny's ranger found a Sword of Storms in a sunken shipwreck that can kill even fire demons."

"How's your Cleric doing, Danny?" Mike asked, putting the last of his papers into his case and zipping it closed.

"Dead," Danny answered, his face falling sadly. "Got eaten by a Tarasque."

"Oh," Mike said, a little surprised. He looked over at Amy. "Isn't a Tarasque a bit much to throw at them until they're higher level?"

She shrugged. "The old man at the tavern warned them not to go in the Cave of Fear. It's not my fault they didn't listen to him."

"Ah," Mike said, understanding completely. "Well, tell me how the Plane of Fire was on Monday." He turned to leave.

"And-" Danny started.

"And, if the new Monster Manual comes over the weekend, I'll give it to you first thing Monday," Mike assured them. "Happy gaming." With that he was out in the halls, the very familiar halls, of Hawkins Middle School. He watched the kids streaming out to begin their glorious weekend. He'd walked, and run, those same halls countless times on his way to class, or to AV club, or on his way home to continue a D&D campaign with his friends. He'd done other things at Hawkins Middle, too. Things he couldn't talk about with anyone who hadn't witnessed it with their own eyes. For most people, monsters didn't exist. Alternate dimensions didn't exist. Little girls who could kill you with their brain didn't exist. For the most part, that was still true, even for Mike.

Principal Clark caught Mike's eye and waved to him cheerfully from the other end of the hall as Mike slipped through the door and out into the teacher parking lot. Mike waved back, just as cheerfully, but he didn't stop to talk so often anymore. These days, he was always as eager to get home after work as the kids were after school.

El Wheeler leaned over the kitchen table, her eyes flicking back and forth between the open pages of a pair of books, one of which, The Hobbit, she was reading for the first time. Off to the side of the table was a small stack of books she'd recently finished. Carl Sagan's The Cosmos, Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, and Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. That one she didn't fully understand, and would have to come back to.

She always went by "El," but if anyone really asked what it was short for, she pretended it was Eleanor, which wasn't her favorite name, but it was plausible enough to forestall awkward questions. A handful of times in her life El had tried being completely honest with new acquaintances about where she had come from, but she had learned that wasn't a very productive line of conversation. Most people had trouble getting past the secret government lab and the experiments and her wild escape. Conversations usually got stuck right then and there, so El had given up on telling the real story. She and her adoptive family had used a number of different cover stories over the years to explain where she'd come from and why she was... different. Those stories ranged from Sweden to Alaska to Utah. Any place far away that the people of Hawkins weren't familiar enough with.

She looked up from The Hobbit to glance at the TV, at one of the three TVs she often kept running at the same time. She couldn't limit herself to only one channel. There was just too much she needed to know. One TV was showing her the Weather Channel, but the one that had caught her attention was showing her a man in a suit named Reverend Billy Graham. TVs were almost as good as books for learning what she'd missed during the first half of her life. Hawkins Lab had taught her how to read, though she'd never been given any interesting books. Apart from that, they'd given her years and years of brain puzzles to solve, mostly because they'd wanted to understand and categorize what she could do, but she'd never been taught anything like history or science. They wanted her to be functional, so she could be the most useful to them, but anything beyond that had been unnecessary. In fact, the very concept of history had been totally alien to her when the Wheeler family had first given her books to read. Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been a complete shock to her, and she'd had to go through it four times before she really understood. Then she had needed to learn the difference between things that really were history, like that book, and things that only sounded like history, like The Hobbit.

"You go immediately after you die to face the judgment," Reverend Billy Graham on the TV said. "And the judgment is not going to decide whether you are saved or lost. The judgment is going to decide your place in hell." El studied the screen for a moment then tried the words out loud herself. "To decide your place in hell," she said. His accent was a little harder than most for her to copy.

Even after ten years of living in Hawkins, people still thought she had an accent. She didn't, not really. It wasn't as if El had grown up speaking something other than English. It was just that the timing of her speech and the words she chose were never exactly like what the every day people of Hawkins used. Unless she really, really tried to imitate another person's fast and careless way of speaking, she stood out as being different. In the end, she'd found it easiest to tell people that's she'd grown up Amish. Once she'd learned that the Amish existed, she'd found it to be the perfect lie. There were enough of them in Indiana, though none in Hawkins, which meant that people she met in Hawkins knew just enough about the Amish to find it a plausible explanation for her weirdness, but not enough to see through the lie.

It wasn't that El couldn't act "normal" if she was purposely trying to act. She'd gotten fairly good at people-watching over the years, and if she really wanted to mimic another person, it wasn't too difficult. But acting took conscious effort, and whenever she relaxed the act and reverted to behaving like "herself" again, she stood out from everyone else. Since she hadn't grown up surrounded by brothers and sisters or classmates, she didn't naturally do the things they did or say the things they said. When she was in a room with other people, inevitably at some point she would find herself sitting while they were standing, or standing while they were sitting, or she would stare at something a half second too long, or she wouldn't laugh at the right moment, or she would react to a word that no one else did, or she wouldn't react to a word that everyone else did. Some people didn't mind it, but other people found it so distracting that they just had to come out and ask El who she was and where she was from, hoping for something that would explain the weirdness.

At least her friends growing up, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will hadn't minded. It wasn't that they didn't find her weird, or at least unusual. They did. But after a while it didn't bother them and, since they were among the very few who knew her whole history, she didn't have to pretend around them.

The one thing she never, ever, under any circumstances, revealed to new people, though, were the special things she could do that they couldn't. Anyone who couldn't turn on a light switch without touching it, which was everyone but El, couldn't conceive such a thing was possible. Even before she'd escaped the lab and started to meet the normal people of Hawkins, El had known she was different. It had been the entire focus of her upbringing. Every single day of the first half of her life people would come to see her and ask her to do things that they couldn't. Sometimes it was Dr. Brenner and the other doctors, orderlies, and techs who worked at the lab. Sometimes it was new people in suits or white labcoats that she'd never met before. Always they asked her to do something that they couldn't do themselves. Crush a coke can. Pick up a pencil. Open a door. Close a door. Read words off a paper that only someone else could see. It usually fascinated them, the things she could do with her mind, and El never wanted that kind of attention. Sometimes is frightened them, and El had never wanted that, either. Back then, the people coming to see her do various tricks with her mind had at least WANTED to see those things. Now, if she walked into Donald's General Store or the Hawk Movie Theater, the people she passed and bumped into and said "hi" to DIDN'T want to see those things. They didn't want to know the things she could do, so she didn't tell them. El was always careful never to let them see. Here in her house, she could do things in safety without anyone finding out.

She glanced away from Billy Graham on the TV to the baby's crib in the living room to make sure it was rocking at just the right speed and rhythm that the baby liked. Making a crib move from side to side from across the room was easy, but there were other things that weren't easy. Over the years, she'd learned her limits. She'd learned which things she could do easily, and which things would leave her lying in a dazed state on the couch for hours afterward. It had been a long, long time since she'd even gotten a nose bleed from using her abilities, because she'd gotten better at some things, and learned which other things were just too taxing to be safe. After flipping a van over hear head once, she'd never needed to do it again, thankfully.

Some things were just too small and intricate to be practical. Tying her shoes or eating with a fork and knife were just so much easier to do with her own hands, but closing a door or calling the baby's teddy bear over from across the room were easy. Again she glanced up from the book to look at the TV.

"All men should be saved," Billy Graham was saying. "That's God's desire."

"That's God's Desiahhh," El tried.

"He wants it so much that he gave his son to die on the cross for you," Billy Graham said.

"To dahh on the cross faaw you," El said, doing her best with the unusual accent. Her eyes flicked over to the third TV where a theme song had just come on.

"And I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there," the song went. "And I'll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air."

As a companion to books, TV was invaluable for helping El to understand some of the things she'd missed during the first half of her life. The people in Hawkins, and the other places she'd visited, just knew so much more STUFF. Whether they were smart or not, the sheer amount of stuff they had seen and heard over their lifetimes astounded El, so she had dedicated herself to catching up.

"No, it's cool Ash," Will Smith was saying to his little cousin, "Look, I'm about to get this party started right. Alright kids, check it out. I'm Ashley's cousin Will, right? And I'm about to hip you all to this new style dancing."

"An' I'm 'bout ta hip y'all to dis new style dancin," El practiced. She had always found Will Smith's accent to be much easier to copy, even if it was a bit erratic and inconsistent.

The faint sound of a dog barking across the street drew her attention. El craned her neck to look out the kitchen window. As she'd expected, Boris the Labrador, who belonged to the Gillespies several houses down, had gotten loose again and was sniffing around a tree across the street. She kept half an eye on him as she continued reading The Hobbit, because she expected very soon little Billy Gillespie would come racing down the sidewalk after his dog, who liked to run away and lead the boy on a chase. Fun though it always was for the dog, the problem was the boy's grandmother, Old Mrs. Gillespie, always came down on him hard for being careless enough to let Boris run off and destroy the neighbors' gardens. El planned to help the boy out this time, and spare him another lecture from his grandmother.

"And in other news," the woman on the Weather Channel said. "It looks like more hurricanes in Miami."

She slid The Hobbit aside and opened one of the other books on the table: "Learn Spanish Fast and Easy. Guaranteed!"

"Y en otros noticias," El said, flipping through in search of the page she wanted. "Parece mas huracanes en Miami." When she'd found the page she was looking for, she frowned at herself. She'd said "otros" instead of "otras." A rookie mistake.

The Spanish was a new project for El. For a brief time the lab had actually tried to teach her Russian. Dr. Brenner had brought in a man who always wore a gray suit and blue tie who would sit with El for three hours a day and try to teach her the foreign language. It had been her first ever experience with a language that wasn't English. Before that, she'd just assumed everyone in the world (however big that might have been) spoke English. Learning Russian hadn't been that difficult, but as soon as Dr. Brenner had found that El could simply broadcast words back to him over a speaker, and that she didn't need to actually know Russian to spy on the Russians, he'd discontinued the lessons as a waste of time. Some years after coming to live with the Wheelers, El had considered getting a book and trying to learn the language again. Ted Wheeler had been a bit alarmed that anyone in his house might be speaking Russian, and when El later learned that literally no one in Hawkins, and barely anyone in all of America spoke Russian, she'd given up the idea.

A small tickle in the back of her mind told her to look out the window again. There he was, little Billy Gillespie running down the sidewalk. A second later, Boris saw him and barked happily, then took off at full speed, hoping Billy would follow. As had happened before, El knew the boy could run all day and never catch his dog, and when Old Mrs. Gillespie had to come get them both in the car, she'd let him have it. Instead, El leaned as close to the window pane as she could and focused on the dog's rear left paw. She drew in a breath, held it, and squeezed just a little. Across the street, Boris stopped in mid stride, one paw suddenly glued to the grass. He looked back and tugged at it, probably wondering what kind of root or vine he'd gotten tangled in. El kept him there until little Billy caught up to his dog, unaware but happy about his good luck, and scooped Boris up in his arms. El watched the boy walk away with a small smile. When he was out of sight, she turned back to make sure the baby's crib was still rocking just right, then returned her attention to the Hobbit.

A few minutes later, the crunch of tires on gravel told her that Mike was home. Good, she thought. Something about The Hobbit had been bothering her, and Mike was a Hobbit expert. She flicked her eyes toward the front door. The knob turned and it swung part way open.

It no longer surprised Mike when the front door of his house popped open before he could even reach the knob, or when the TV came on or changed channels seemly of its own will. Such little oddities were commonplace when living with El. He'd gotten used to them, and they didn't even serve to remind him anymore of greater supernatural things. They'd become a mundane part of his life, to the point where he rarely if ever thought about the bizarre and impossible series of events that had led to him meeting El ten years ago.

She was inside, standing over the kitchen table with her head bent over a pair of books. The sounds of three different TV channels competed with each other for his attention. Yet more things that he took as normal these days.

He could tell from El's body language that she must have been waiting to ask him an important question all day.

"Mike," she said as he reached the table. She picked up one of the two books and plopped it down closer to him. He glanced down at The Hobbit, and then back up at her.

"The Eagles." She began.

"How's Allie?" Mike asked, before he delved into a hard to explain tangent.

"Asleep," El told him, inclining her head toward the living room. Mike leaned back until he could see through he open doorway where the baby's crib stood, gently rocking by itself.

"The Eagles," El said again. She still spent words as if they cost twenty dollars each. Mike had always known her to be that way.

"Okay, the Eagles," he said, deciding that he'd go check on the baby after he tackled the problem of the Eagles.

"Why don't they carry the Dwarves all the way to the Misty Mountains?" She asked.

"Oh," Mike said, considering the answer. "Well, I guess it's not really the Eagle's fight, you know? Getting their treasure and their mountain back from the dragon is the Dwarves' mission."

"But the Eagles could help," El said.

"They could, I guess," Mike said. "But it's not their responsibility. The Eagles just live out there in the wild... just being Eagles. They don't worry about treasure and Dwarven kingdoms."

El frowned skeptically, and Mike was considering whether he should defend Tolkien and his Eagles more vigorously when he was struck with a sudden wave of danger.

It felt dark, and cold, and frightening.

It was a feeling he sometimes got, always around El, always when she sensed something was wrong.

Her head snapped around toward the living room and the baby's crib. Mike was aware of hearing the baby give the smallest of cries, like she was having a bad dream.

Then he smelled smoke.

Suddenly the kitchen was hot. He could feel heat pouring in waves from their living room. El bolted past him and through the door way. With two panicked and stumbling steps he was right behind her. Half of the living room was already engulfed in bright orange flames. The couch, the carpet, the TV, and the baby's crib were already burning. In the time that he stared, frozen in wide eyed horror, which must half been less than half a second, the fire spread to swallow up the entire living room, walls, floor, ceiling, and all. Bright tongues of flame began to dance toward the kitchen, toward Mike and El, and he took a reflex step back from the unbearable heat.

He tried to scream "Allie," but his lungs filled up with smoke and air that was too hot to breath. The word came out only as a choking cough. He couldn't even see the crib anymore, the fire had grown so large. Next to him, El reached out with one hand, and the baby came floating through the leaping flames like a football to land in her arms. She pointed him toward their front door and yelled "Go!"

Literally shaking with the adrenaline from believing his baby to be gone and then seeing her alive again almost literally within the same second, he turned and scrambled for the door, reaching toward the knob with an unsteady hand. El was faster, though, and she blasted the door before the two of them reached it. The in-swing door was blown off its hinges and flew out into their front yard in a shower of splinters. Mike and El ran through, and kept running until they reached the side of the road.

When El stopped running, Mike reached out with shaking hands to inspect the baby. Biting down on his worst fears, he expected to find her skin burned and blistered and nearly gone. Amazingly, baby Allie's skin was as pink and perfect as ever. Somehow, the flames hadn't touched her. She was as naked as the day he'd first held her, though, and Mike briefly wondered if her clothes had burned off, though it would have been impossible for the fire to have burned the clothes and not the baby. Now she was squirming and fussing, but not crying, almost unaware of what had just gone on around her.

Puzzled but relieved beyond words, Mike turned back to stare at their house. El was staring, too. Smoke was pouring out of the windows and rising in a big plume into the sky. In the few seconds it had taken them to cross their front lawn, the fire had spread from a single room to envelope the entire house. Mike had never seen anything like it.

As he stared at the house, which was now beginning to crumble in places, the words "What happened" floated into his mind, but he didn't say them out loud. In the back of his mind, he knew. It was yet another one of those things that Mike had turned normal in his own mind. He hardly ever thought about it consciously, because if he tried to put it into words, he would have to admit how inexplicable, how fantastical, how impossible it was.

But it wasn't impossible, clearly.